Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? - Mary Wollstonecraft

When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?

Remember , that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water or my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade.

Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death — a state which I feared yet did not understand.